At its 30th anniversary party, Acer moved up the time it expects to take over the number-three slot in global PC market share to 2007, shaving a year off its previous forecast.Its strategy is to partner with more PC parts suppliers and distributors, who in turn will help to expand its market. Expressing confidence in that business model, Acer executives said the company could keep up its breakneck growth and topple Lenovo Holdings by the end of next year.“We can become number three through organic growth, not through merger and acquisition,” said Gianfranco Lanci, president of Acer, during the celebration Tuesday at an upscale hotel in downtown Taipei.China’s Lenovo is currently third in global PC shipments, with 7.8 percent of the market, according to IDC. Although Acer trails at 6 percent, the company is growing at a much faster pace than Lenovo: 34.3 percent in the third quarter, compared to about 10 percent for Lenovo. In fact, Acer’s growth rate vastly outpaced the first- and second-place PC makers as well, with Hewlett-Packard at 15 percent and Dell at 3.6 percent. The Taiwanese PC maker expects to continue its momentum in PC sales by selling more laptops and small form-factor desktops. By focusing on smaller desktops, Acer can run the business similarly to its laptop business, said J.T. Wang, chairman of the company.It will also continue to hone its strategy of partnering with more suppliers and distributors. Acer believes the key to winning over new partners is to offer good products that generate stable demand, and giving up some profit margin to ensure its channel partners make reasonable profits as well. “They grow with us,” said Wang. And the partnership makes it difficult for partners to do anything that hurts Acer, since their profits become tied together. “If they hurt Acer, they hurt themselves,” Wang added.The direct sales method championed by Dell has matured somewhat, Wang and Lanci said, as electronics retailers learned to market PC hardware on the Internet as well.Acer believes the United States and China will continue to grow in importance for the company, despite the fact it entered the two markets only a short time ago. The United States already accounts for as much as 20 percent of Acer’s revenue, up from almost nothing two years ago, while China accounts for about 6 percent, Lanci said.Acer’s revenue rose 17 percent year on year in the first nine months of the year to new Taiwanese $250.99 billion (US$7.5 billion), and securities houses such as Goldman Sachs expect it to forecast brisk fourth-quarter growth when it holds an investors’ conference later this week.-Dan Nystedt, IDG News Service (Taipei Bureau)Related Links: HP Overtakes Dell in Global PC Space Acer, Sony in Talks over Battery Recall Yahoo, Acer Ink Homepage, Search PactCheck out our CIO News Alerts and Tech Informer pages for more updated news coverage. Related content brandpost The steep cost of a poor data management strategy Without a data management strategy, organizations stall digital progress, often putting their business trajectory at risk. Here’s how to move forward. By Jay Limbasiya, Global AI, Analytics, & Data Management Business Development, Unstructured Data Solutions, Dell Technologies Jun 09, 2023 6 mins Data Management feature How Capital One delivers data governance at scale With hundreds of petabytes of data in operation, the bank has adopted a hybrid model and a ‘sloped governance’ framework to ensure its lines of business get the data they need in real-time. By Thor Olavsrud Jun 09, 2023 6 mins Data Governance Data Management feature Assessing the business risk of AI bias The lengths to which AI can be biased are still being understood. The potential damage is, therefore, a big priority as companies increasingly use various AI tools for decision-making. By Karin Lindstrom Jun 09, 2023 4 mins CIO Artificial Intelligence IT Leadership brandpost Rebalancing through Recalibration: CIOs Operationalizing Pandemic-era Innovation By Kamal Nath, CEO, Sify Technologies Jun 08, 2023 6 mins CIO Digital Transformation Podcasts Videos Resources Events SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe